Mental health consequences of childhood cancer

mental health childhood cancerWorldwide, more than 175,000 new cases of childhood cancer are diagnosed each year.

Georgie Johnstone, a recent vacation scholar at the Trauma Recovery Lab talks you through some thought-provoking new research on cancer and PTSD.

Overall, in children under 15 years living in the industrialised world, childhood cancer is the 4th most common cause of death. However, childhood cancer is no longer the death sentence it once was, with overall survival rates in high-income countries now at about 80 percent.

How are survivors affected by the potentially traumatic experience of their diagnosis and treatment, and how does it impact on the rest of their life and that of their family? Research has indicated that cancer survivors are at an increased risk not only from somatic late effects related to cancer and treatment, but also for depression, anxiety and antisocial behaviour. Lifetime prevalence of cancer-related PTSD has been estimated at 20-35% in survivors and 27-54% in their parents. However, new research in the Journal of Clinical Oncology has challenged these estimates.

The risk of a focusing illusion
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Ear for Recovery

Ear for RecoveryWe know that parents are incredibly important for children’s recovery from a traumatic event. Social support is one of the strongest predictors of trauma recovery. On the other hand, parental distress after trauma is related to children’s posttraumatic stress later on.

But how do parents exactly influence children’s trajectory after something bad has happened? Continue reading

Resilience, or how to “take a licking and keep on ticking”

resilienceThe days that we only focus on pathology after trauma are long gone. In the past two decades, the literature that adopts a ‘well being’ rather than a ‘deficit’ model has grown substantially. In 1990, the field had published 4 English papers on resilience. Today, there are 858.1

But what is resilience? And how do we become more resilient? The topic is not without controversy. In a panel session at the ISTSS conference, profs Rachel Yehuda, George Bonanno, Ann Masten, and Catherine Panter-Brick gave their views. Here is what I took home:

What is resilience? Continue reading

Help us to make research findings widely available

Despite significant movement towards Open Science, many clinicians, policymakers, and citizens can still not access the latest research evidence on e.g. therapy effectiveness. Many research articles are still ‘hidden’ behind paywalls.

With the Global Young Academy we have just launched the More Open Access pledge. Researchers can sign up to this pledge; they promise to submit at least 1 manuscript to an outlet that is Open Access by the end of the year.

While the pledge is not yet well known, we want to reach out to Heads of Departments (the leaders of university departments) to ask them to consider the pledge and to encourage their staff to do the same.

To identify the right people (i.e. Heads of Department in practice/policy-oriented disciplines), we are looking for conscientious, friendly freelances who have an affinity with education and research, as well as excellent English language skills.

We have a list of 400 universities and need our freelancers to identify specific departments and then the last name and email address of the head of department. We expect this to be about 3000 email addresses in total but we do not know exactly. We will pay per 300 email addresses sourced (150 dollar).

As part of your application, we would like you to provide us with 1 set of email addresses, for Duke University in the USA. Please find the instructions below.

We look forward to seeing your application!

 

 

Instructions

For each department we are looking for the personal contact details of the Head of Department (HoD is the leader of a university department, usually a full professor).

Our focus is on departments with major relevance for practice / policy making:

  • Public/Global Health
  • Psychology
  • Pediatrics
  • Emergency Medicine
  • Psychiatry
  • Sociology
  • Environmental Science

A few points for consideration:

  • Departments have various names but the disciplines above give you an indication of what we’re looking for. Beware that medicine & psychiatry are sometimes part of the university hospital
  • You can adjust the titles of the departments if needed (we don’t need exact titles, key words are fine)
  • If a university has many relevant departments (e.g. several psychology departments), choose a maximum of 10 departments (i.e. max 10 addresses per university), certainly including public health and psychology

Format:

Department Last name of the Head of Dept Email address
Public/Global Health

Psychology

Pediatrics

Emergency Medicine

Psychiatry

Sociology

Environmental Science

We’d rather rely on others to do the hard work

Social capitalIt’s called the collective action problem: we’d rather rely on others to do the hard work.

In a cohesive community however, it is more likely that people will volunteer to become active. The reason? The enforceable trust that comes with the cohesion.

This is important for how you organise your daily working life (make sure your team is cohesive) 🙂 but may also explain why some communities have less trouble than others to overcome disaster experiences. Continue reading